Q&A with candidates

In place of an interview, Christopher Howard referred us to his cover letter, which is where all the answers in this article were taken from.

With the presidential forums more than halfway over, we asked the candidates five questions about themselves and their stances on important issues.

Q: Are you excited to be in the final 3?

Michele Wheatly: “I feel very honored, and I’m very excited at the opportunity. I think this a potentially interesting hiring, because of course the merger has taken place as of 2006 and in everything that I’ve heard and read, that’s gone down really very well.”

“My understanding is that everybody’s come together in the same household and is really getting along well, figuring out how to work well together.”

Sharon Gaber: “I look forward to hearing from them, and I hope we have a great conversation … I’m excited about the entire opportunity.”

Gaber said the search committee was “wonderful to talk to,” and that future conversations with UT leadership will offer ways to move the university forward.

Christopher Howard: In his cover letter, Howard wrote “It would be an honor” to be able to further discuss with the committee and university “the role I might play in helping this fine school (Rocket) achieve even greater heights.”

Q: Why UT?

Michele Wheatly: “I worked for 17 years in the state of Ohio at Wright State University in Dayton, and so I have a lot of connections to the state,” Wheatly said. “I heard on the grapevine that the position was open, and the more that I learned about the merger with the … Medical University of Ohio and the University of Toledo, I thought this might be a good fit for my skills and interests.”

Sharon Gaber: According to Gaber, she chose to apply to UT because it is “in a fantastic location with the opportunity to have an impact on a region and make it stronger and better, which is really what I have learned to do by discipline and get excited about doing as well.”

Christopher Howard: “The University of Toledo has all the attributes of a 21st-century exemplar campus.” Howard wrote, adding that “as one of the few institutions offering terminal degrees in virtually all the health sciences, UT has and will continue to attract the brightest faculty, staff and students from around the world.”

Q: What do you think the role of president means?

Michele Wheatly: “I think being a president of any large organization…is a challenging role, because in a way, you have to be a figurehead,” Wheatly said. “So you have to person of high integrity, a person who has credibility, because the most important thing you have to do is build trust in the organization.”

Sharon Gaber: The president needs to be an “inspirational leader; it’s somebody communicating with students, communicating with faculty. It’s somebody listening to one of the issues, having the groups on campus to work on those issues, making the connections in Northwest Ohio,” said Gaber.

Christopher Howard: “My sense is that the next president of the University of Toledo would have experience leading an institution of higher learning and the myriad challenges associated with doing so,” Howard’s cover letter read.

Q: What does leadership mean to you?

Michele Wheatly: “In most industries, it’s primarily about distributed leadership and you have to have people working as part of a team,” Wheatly said. “All hands on deck. All the faculty, all the students, the staff.”

She said the university needs both distributed involvement and someone as a primary leader.

“You’ve got to have some level of distributed involvement in the university,” Wheatly said. “At the same time, you need to have somebody out there in front that they want to inspire others, and that’s probably one of the things I have done well in all of the roles I’ve had thus far.”

Sharon Gaber: Gaber said she is big on shared governance, and described herself as collaborative and communicative. She said she meets monthly with many university groups including the student government and faculty senate there.

“Anybody can come in and say, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do.’ Well, you want people that are working alongside you,” she said. “You want them bought into the concept.”

Christopher Howard: Howard said in his cover letter he recognizes “presidents work within the framework of shared governance together with faculty, students, staff, coaches, alumni, the local community and the board of trustees to achieve mutually agreed-upon goals. Said another way, leadership in higher education requires a team effort.”

Q: How do you plan on handling the university’s finances?

Michele Wheatly: Running a budget for a university is no different from running a household budget; it just is a larger scale,

according to Wheatly.

“The test of priority is to make sure that all the resources currently flowing into the university are actually used to promote missions of the university,” she said.

In her time as provost, Wheatly said she was responsible for a large amount of resources — specifically, a $2.5 billion budget.

“I absolutely love math,” she said. “There are very elegant solutions to any very complicated, arithmetic equation.” One solution Wheatly suggested to bring more money into the university is to “identify new revenue streams.”

Sharon Gaber: “Obviously, raising tuition is not the answer,” Gaber said. “We’re going to lose students if we wind up doing that.”

Instead, she suggested increasing the number of students that are enrolled at UT as a way to bring in more money without raising tuition.

“It’s probably looking also at private philanthropy. I would need to be out fundraising to assist with scholarships,” she said.

Christopher Howard: While Howard’s cover letter did not include any tactics or strategies specific to UT’s financial situation, he wrote he increased enrollment while keeping debt down. “When I arrived at my current institution almost six years ago,” Howard wrote, “we were slated to run a $2MM [sic] deficit and now are projected to run almost a $1MM [sic] surplus.”